Rhetorician Deanna Mascle

Exploring rhetoric

and its meaning to me

Metawriting by Deanna Mascle: The Forgotten "R"

Preparing for your doctoral qualifying exam is more than a bit like scrapbooking. I think this might be true anyway since my scrapbooks are all hideously in need of updating. Doctoral studies have a way of doing that to you. I have spent a great deal of time lately sifting and sorting through books, articles, and notes -- and taken many walks down memory lane in the process. This "scrapbooking" process has also allowed me to take a step back and look at all this academic clutter to see it as a whole and to see patterns I had either missed the first time around or forgotten about while in the midst of gathering new information. Some of those discoveries will provide fodder (hopefully) for my qualifying exam and my dissertation, but one discovery is much more foundational -- my identity as a rhetorician.

Metawriting by Deanna Mascle: Finding Rhetorical Agency

A funny thing happened while I was struggling to define and understand rhetorical agency and how my work connects with it...I not only learned about rhetorical agency but found it as well.

I have been struggling for months with situating my research within the bounds of technical communication and rhetoric (see The Forgotten "R") while simultaneously reading the research I needed to inform that work. What truly complicated the boundaries for me (I only just realized) is that so much of that research fell within the disciplines of psychology and education with just a smattering of composition work. I needed this work to define and ground my research -- to feed it -- but I also needed to locate my work (which is not in psychology, education, or composition) within the discipline of rhetoric.

Writing self-efficacy

Metawriting by Deanna Mascle: Why am I studying writing self-efficacy?

I don't believe the ability to write is a gift from the Muse. I believe becoming a competent writer can be learned, but I do not believe it can be taught. This is especially true of the way that we so often teach writing -- with a sort of inoculation instruction focused on "mutt genres" intended to prevent future bad writing that may help student writers in the short term, but not in the long term. I am not all that confident of the "may help" either, because all too often, I believe it does more harm than good by reinforcing students' belief that they will never, can never, be writers. This is very harmful indeed because writing is such an essential part of communicating today. I think we can better serve our students by shifting our focus away from teaching context-less writing lessons and focus more on helping them become writers.

Some thoughts about teaching

Metawriting by Deanna Mascle: The 3 Lessons I Hope You Take Away

As we near the end of our semester together, I wanted to share with you three lessons that I hope you take away from this class. Clearly my goal for this writing class was to help you become better writers, but if my own work as a writer and as a scholar of writing studies has taught me anything it is that you - and you alone - can make this happen. I cannot make you a better writer and I cannot teach you how to be a better writer, but I can give you experiences that will shape you into a writer. Hopefully I did so this semester.

Metawriting by Deanna Mascle: Calling For A Revolution or It’s About The Writer, Stupid

American education is in crisis and nowhere is this more evident than when we look at the teaching of writing. Despite decades of research in support of the teaching of writing and the fact that we know more than ever before about how people learn to write as well as how to effectively teach writing - we do not see this knowledge used to improve the teaching of writing in any consistent fashion. We need a revolution in the teaching of writing but there is not even a whisper of a battle cry in the trenches. As a writing teacher I ask myself every day what we should be doing to improve the teaching of writing and I have come to the conclusion that we are simply focusing on the wrong things.

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CV

Curriculum vitae

Research interests

My research interests include:
Writing Studies with a focus on professional and technical writing
Collaboration and Negotiation
Digital Rhetoric

Scholarship

Presentations and publications